1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and a computer program. More specifically, the present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and a computer program, which create a plurality of edited images from a single image and store edit information as to the editing of the image.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, owing to cost requirements of a content production, a user who produces a content for business use normally performs planning, shooting, and editing of the content all by himself or herself instead of dividing necessary processes for the content production between professionals of respective processes to produce a sophisticated content. However, there are a few users who have sophisticated skills in a plurality of operations performed in a plurality of processes for the content production. Most users are skilled in some operations but not in others.
In general, when creating a content, the user needs to consider scenes that constitute the content, shoot each of the scenes, and edit the content. Such operations are not easy even for a professional content creator if he or she is not experienced in some areas of the operations. As such, there has been proposed a system for assisting in content creation (see, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2004-32277, referred to as Patent Document 1 hereinafter). According to a content creation system as described in Patent Document 1, content plan data is generated based on a template in which a structure and contents of scenes are set in such a manner as to provide a guide, whereby even an inexperienced user can design a content plan with a sophisticated level. Further, by carrying out a shooting based on the content plan data and allocating video image signals obtained by the shooting to the scenes in the content plan data, it is possible to easily complete the content based on the content plan data.
However, although the above related art system facilitates the planning and editing of the content, obtaining a desired video image is still difficult for a user who is not skilled in shooting or editing of video images. For example, even if it is planned to shoot a video image of a mountain on a clear day, if the weather is cloudy on the day of shooting, the user is not able to shoot a desired video image. Even in such a case, an experienced professional of the shooting and editing of video images would easily obtain the desired video image with his or her shooting and editing techniques. However, inexperienced users or users who are not skilled in the shooting and editing of video images will have to spend a great amount of time and energy to obtain the desired video image, e.g., changing the setting of a camera device many times for shooting, or trying various editing operations at the stage of editing video images obtained by the shooting. It may sometimes happen that a plan should be changed, for example, to carry out a shooting again on another day.
As such, the present invention has been made in view of such problems, and an advantage of the present invention is to provide an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and a computer program, which are capable of widening a professional area related to the shooting and editing of video images, thereby making it easy and more certain to acquire a desired video image.